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  As the confirmation hearing concluded, Democratic and Republican senators effusively praised their new commander in Afghanistan. Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia, gave Petraeus credit for defending not only America but the entire globe. “Thanks to you, thanks to your family, for the great commitment that you continue to make to protect America, as well as literally the whole world.” One of his longtime mentors, Keith Nightingale, a retired Army colonel, called the hearing a coronation—and it worried Nightingale greatly. Obama’s decision to nominate Petraeus to succeed McChrystal, Nightingale said, was brilliant. If Petraeus could pull a rabbit out of the hat in Afghanistan, so much the better. If he couldn’t, Obama would be able to say he’d done all that he could by appointing America’s best general to command the campaign—and blame Petraeus. How their relationship would evolve was anyone’s guess.

  There remained great skepticism about the United States’ ability to succeed in Afghanistan. Many analysts, particularly those in the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, doubted whether the United States, struggling economically and beset by record budget deficits, could continue spending $100 billion a year on the war in Afghanistan—borrowed money—for the amount of time it would take Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy to succeed. Few believed that would happen anywhere close to the July 2011 drawdown date. Many also argued that the initial rationale for war in Afghanistan—driving out al-Qaeda—no longer existed, since the terrorist organization had long since left Afghanistan and regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan, as well as in Yemen, East Africa and Iraq. Pakistan’s covert role in supporting the Taliban remained deeply troubling and had the potential to undermine whatever progress Petraeus’s forces made on the ground in Afghanistan. And many saw the government of President Hamid Karzai as deeply corrupt and inept, hardly a force around which to win hearts and minds.

  Indeed, some analysts in Washington argued that, as a strategy, counterinsurgency wasn’t really applicable, because Afghanistan was not a country with a central government beset by a repressive insurgency, but rather one in the midst of a civil war with multiple ethnic and sectarian parties vying for power. Many believed that international intervention in Afghanistan was a hindrance to the development of effective government in Afghanistan, not a catalyst for creating it, and that counterinsurgency was the problem, triggering a surge of suicide terrorists reacting to foreign military occupation. Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a reported centrist Republican, summed up the policy angst in a cover story in Newsweek that hit the newsstands shortly after Petraeus arrived in Afghanistan. The headline: “We’re Not Winning. It’s Not Worth It. Here’s How to Draw Down in Afghanistan.”

  The next night, following Petraeus’s confirmation hearing, Vice President Biden flew to MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, the home of Central Command headquarters, to have dinner with Petraeus and his wife as a show of support. One of Petraeus’s aides called it “the last supper.” Petraeus had been confirmed unanimously in a 99–0 vote by the Senate that day, and he departed for Afghanistan the next morning.

  VILLAGE BY VILLAGE, valley by valley, Afghanistan is one of the most forbidding, inhospitable places on earth to fight a major war. The soaring, snowcapped Hindu Kush range bisects the country, which is about the size of Texas, running from its eastern border with Pakistan to its western border with Iran. The average altitude is 14,000 feet, with some peaks reaching 25,000 feet. The hazards and hardships of fighting there were first brought home in the early days of the global war on terror, when seven service members died on a freezing mountain called Takur Ghar in March 2002. It was the largest combat loss of life in a single day since eighteen soldiers had died during the Black Hawk Down battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. But by July 2010, the heaviest fighting had shifted to the lush terrain around the southern city of Kandahar, where canals, mud walls, vineyards and dirt roads had all been intricately seeded with deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—roadside bombs by a fancier name. They were by far the biggest killers of American troops and their NATO allies.

  “Every tiny piece of terrain out here exacts a terrible price,” Army Special Forces officer Major Fernando Lujan wrote to his former students at West Point [members of the “Long Gray Line”], who themselves would soon be serving in Afghanistan. “You just hope that commanders will learn quickly to pay only once. Don’t clear what you can’t hold. The Taliban will reclaim it before you finish walking or driving back to your base and lay IEDs along the way you came.” It is axiomatic in counterinsurgency warfare that land taken but not held becomes a victory for the insurgents. Once the insurgents return, the population feels abandoned. Lujan, starting a three-year tour rotation between Afghanistan and an Afghan-related billet in the United States, had just returned from an advisory mission with U.S. and Afghan units in the lush Arghandab River Valley, outside Kandahar, where Soviet forces staged their last offensive before withdrawing in defeat in 1989. His letter to his students captured the war Petraeus was about to inherit.

  Lujan described the “worst IED threat I have ever seen in my life” and said that the “insurgents have figured out how to make caveman-simple, pressure plate or command wire devices against which all our technology is worthless. We’re seeing a reverse evolution in tactics, and they’re deadly effective.” Lujan foreshadowed the fighting that was to come in the Arghandab District of Kandahar Province in the fall.

  By the time he wrote the cadets, Lujan was speaking Dari, sporting a heavy beard and wearing an Afghan uniform. Lujan had gone native in his role, melding his background and training as a Special Forces and foreign-area officer. He loved what he was able to do and figured that if he died in Afghanistan, it would have been for a worthwhile cause.

  Lujan, as a member of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT), was part of Petraeus’s team of “directed telescopes,” and Petraeus would come to greatly value his insights. The directed telescope concept, once employed by Napoleon, is a process by which a senior commander uses aides or trusted advisers, often junior officers, to focus on issues beyond his sights, thus helping the commander expand his knowledge of the battlefield. As such, the CAAT was a group of current and former military officers, heavy on Special Operations experience and Ph.D.s, created a year earlier by McChrystal to help develop ideas to enable troopers on the ground to shift their primary mission from killing the enemy to protecting the population. Working out of the regional commands and circulating from combat base to combat base, CAAT members would gather periodically in Kabul and brief commanders, a practice that would be continued—and encouraged—by Petraeus, whose need for information never seemed to be satisfied.

  The CAAT is not to be confused with Petraeus’s Commander’s Initiatives Group (CIG). If the CAAT was an external brain trust, the CIG was an internal one, operating within Petraeus’s command headquarters as a team of trusted action officers, all with advanced degrees and most with time in Afghanistan, focused on issues of particular and immediate importance to the general—preparation of briefings for important visitors and for video teleconferences (VTC) with Washington and Brussels, provision of talking points for meetings with Karzai, help with issues at Central Command and the Pentagon and drafting responses to urgent requests for help from the regional commanders. What Petraeus prized in the CIG, and on the staff, was brains, judgment and a great work ethic. Rank was often immaterial. Petraeus also had a coterie of former subordinates and colleagues with whom he kept in touch via e-mail as part of a “virtual CIG.” He considered himself a “relentless” communicator, both for getting his message out and for vacuuming information up.

  Petraeus also depended on another group of “directed telescopes”—the academic experts, outside mentors and think-tankers he brought in to provide yet another set of eyes to help him sort out various issues. While Petraeus considered Lujan and other CAAT members to be important directed telescopes, h
e also asked former officers, such as his mentor, retired Army general Jack Keane, and defense intellectuals, such as Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and his wife, Kim, founder of the Institute for the Study of War, to travel the country and gather information and insights from the field. Though some in the field did not take kindly to their probing, the insights they brought back supplemented those provided by the normal chain of command and various staff officers and were crucial for Petraeus’s understanding of the effectiveness of the campaign in Afghanistan.

  Just as Lujan provided insights to Petraeus, he also counseled his former students by e-mail. “This is the land of old school, light infantry style, small unit patrolling—walking 5-10 km cross country in 110 degree heat,” he wrote to them. “The enemy is aggressive, and not afraid of direct, violent, short-range combat. . . . There are villages out here that are literally completely deserted, populated only by Taliban and foreign fighters, rigged with some of the most complex IED arrays ever witnessed in modern warfare. Leave them be. Focus your resources on places you can make a difference. Disrupt the enemy when required to support your campaign or to gain some space and time. Strike at his networks—but don’t fixate on him.”

  Just weeks before Obama nominated Petraeus to be his new commander in Afghanistan, the war there had become America’s longest. It had been eight years and nine months since fighting began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Vietnam War had lasted eight years and eight months, from the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in Congress, on August 7, 1964, to the final withdrawal of American ground forces in March 1973. Almost nine years of fighting and more than one thousand dead in Afghanistan had produced little in the way of security. The fighting was fierce. In July 2010, more American service members were killed—fifty-eight—than in any other month of the war. By the end of August, when troop fatalities for the year reached 359, 2010 had already become the bloodiest year of the long campaign. Civilian casualties—deaths and injuries—were also surging, up 31 percent in the first six months over the same period a year earlier, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported. The UN attributed nearly three-quarters of those casualties to the Taliban and other “anti-government elements” and noted two ominous trends behind their attacks: more increasingly sophisticated IEDs and a 95 percent increase in assassinations and executions, all aimed at keeping Afghans from cooperating with the Americans and their NATO allies.

  The Taliban had spread to all but one of the country’s thirty-four provinces. Just four years earlier, they had been active in only four. Conditions in the countryside had become so dangerous that aid workers could safely travel in only 30 percent of Afghanistan’s 368 districts, according to the UN, and a group called the Afghan NGO Safety Office said the country had become more dangerous than in any year since the war began. Part of the Taliban’s surge had apparently come in response to an American plan, announced the prior year, to concentrate on 80 of those 368 districts, mostly in the east and south, where the Taliban were concentrated. The Taliban simply moved to where the Americans were not. That the Taliban were still around at all in significant numbers spoke to how the war in Afghanistan had been “under-resourced” since the beginning of the U.S. intervention, as Petraeus would frequently note. In fact, when McChrystal had arrived in Afghanistan and conducted his review in the summer of 2009, it became readily apparent to him that more forces were necessary to begin to meet the objectives the administration had laid out. At Central Command headquarters, Petraeus agreed with this assessment and supported McChrystal’s desire for more troops, as did Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  It wasn’t until May 2010 that troop strength in Afghanistan surpassed the number of troops in Iraq—and this was only after the number in Iraq had been reduced significantly. Even so, the 100,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be some 65,000 less than the U.S. high-water mark during the surge in Iraq. But the issue was more than just numbers of troops; Petraeus thought everything that was needed to win had been slighted in Afghanistan—Special Forces, intelligence systems, civil engineers, State Department analysts, trainers for Afghan troops, contract-management specialists. He recognized the irony: As commander in Iraq, he had fought for every resource possible—and had received most of what he requested. But that had deprived the commanders in Afghanistan and other conflict areas of what they needed from the military’s robust but still finite resource pool. Now Petraeus would have to fight the bureaucracy to acquire those resources for his new battlefield. Thankfully, he recognized, Mullen and Gates supported his requests.

  Having increased troop strength in Afghanistan from 32,800 to 69,000 in his first year in office, Obama announced on December 1, 2009, in a speech to cadets at West Point, that he had acted on a recommendation from the military and Gates and decided to add another 30,000 troops—the last of which would not arrive in the country until late August 2010, several weeks after Petraeus had arrived in theater, as it happened. But by July 2011, Obama said, a drawdown would begin at a pace based on conditions on the ground.

  The new surge of troops added momentum to the campaign, which continued to make incremental progress. Militarily, the Taliban had for months been suffering heavy casualties, both from Special Operations Forces, in targeted raids aimed at killing leaders, and from conventional forces conducting clearance operations in ever greater numbers. U.S. and NATO forces had killed numerous Taliban shadow governors and wrested control from the Taliban of a number of safe havens, although Petraeus was clearly concerned about the insurgents’ ability to seek refuge and regroup across the border in Pakistan. Before his demise at the hands of Rolling Stone, McChrystal in 2009 had succeeded in creating three new three-star military commands—one to train Afghan forces, which was meeting its goals, the second to serve as the operational commander in Afghanistan and the third to oversee U.S. detainee operations, reform Afghanistan’s prisons and focus on improving the Afghan legal system. The overall result of the additional forces and other resources was that, by midsummer, in 124 key districts, the military reported deterioration in seven but progress in seventeen.

  For Petraeus, the uneasy situation in Marjah, a former Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province where U.S. Marines had fought hard in February and March, provided the best window into what immediately awaited his command in Kandahar, birthplace of the Taliban. The battle for Marjah, Operation Moshtarak, had been the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the initial assaults that toppled the Taliban in 2001. Until that sector was cleared, no real progress could be made throughout the rest of Helmand Province. But it was hardly a battle of opposing armies. The American-led forces cleared the constellation of poor villages house by house, encountering pockets of resistance and a welter of IEDs. Thousands of Afghans fled or cowered in their homes. By the time the fighting was over, two weeks later, eight Marines, two Afghan soldiers and an Afghan police officer had lost their lives. U.S. military officials immediately promised to deliver a new “government in a box” to speed the delivery of services to villagers and brought back Haji Abdul Zahir from Germany as Marjah’s governor.

  But on the eve of Petraeus’s arrival in July, Zahir was fired for incompetence. Effective local government remained an elusive goal, and Marjah remained a difficult place for U.S. forces. Part of the problem might have been overpromising on governance when the real accomplishment had been purely military, eliminating the Taliban stronghold and staging area. But the damage was done, and even Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the American special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was ambivalent. “It’s not accurate to say Marjah’s a failure, and it’s premature to say Marjah’s a success,” he observed. The box that was supposed to have contained the district government was derided by many commentators as having been empty.

  At his confirmation hearing before
the Armed Services Committee, Petraeus described Marjah as having been the “nexus” of the Taliban and the illegal narcotics industry. He noted that “the enemy has fought back as we have taken away his sanctuaries. . . . Nothing has been easy in those operations, but six months ago we could not have walked through the market in Marjah, as I was able to do with the district governor there two months ago.” Unspoken was Petraeus’s sense that McChrystal’s command had overpromised in Marjah and paid a price publicly when holding the critical town in Helmand became far more difficult than people had been led to expect. Petraeus knew that the strongholds around Kandahar, if anything, would be even more difficult to seize and hold, to say nothing of the difficulty of fighting in the harsh high altitudes of the forbidding Hindu Kush to the east along the Pakistan border. Indeed, the markets in Marjah had become dangerous places again since his visit, and the Taliban worked hard at intimidating—and, at times, executing—those who cooperated with the Americans. Insurgents, who easily blended into the population, enjoyed relative freedom of movement.

  The slow progress in Marjah did not bode well for what had always been envisioned as the follow-on phase of Operation Moshtarak: the assault on Kandahar city, to the east of Helmand Province. If Marjah was mainly a military target and had been effectively neutralized, Kandahar was far more. The stronghold of the Taliban movement, Kandahar city and the difficult surrounding terrain would have to be cleared militarily by ISAF and Afghan forces and then pacified and governed effectively by local Afghans if Petraeus was to be able to achieve real success on the ground.